Felix beyond the Closet: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Relations of Power in Arturo Islas's "The Rain God"

Autor/in	Padilla, Yolanda
Titel	Felix beyond the Closet: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Relations of Power in Arturo Islas's "The Rain God"
Quelle	In: Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 34 (2009) 2, S.11-34 (24 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0005-2604
Schlagwörter	Stellungnahme; Publishing Industry; Homosexuality; Cultural Context; Novels; Masculinity; Literature; Hispanic American Literature; Politics; Power Structure; Self Concept; Ethnicity + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Homosexualität; Novel; Roman; Männlichkeit; Literatur; Politik; Selbstkonzept; Ethnizität
Abstract	This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas's "The Rain God" has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix's sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano literature in the 1970s, for its emphasis on ethnonationalist novels that featured "positive images" of Chicanos, and he suggests that Quinto Sol rejected "The Rain God" for failing to conform to this mold. I speculate that the simple fact that the novel includes homosexual characters would have been enough for it to be deemed too negative in that era. I argue that Islas's representations of homosexuality continue to disrupt notions of identity, but now the disjuncture is not that homosexuals are represented but that they are incoherent with the closet paradigm that is predominant in significant strains of queer studies. Drawing on recent scholarship that warns against a fixation on identity as the grounding principle for sexual experience and politics, I read Felix as a character whose transgressive expressions of homosexuality are shaped by a tangled web of power dynamics that are associated with his feelings of ethnic and masculine insecurity. Ultimately, I show that the very qualities that make Felix discomfiting to readers and resistant to narratives of identity are generative points of analysis for Chicano literary studies. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. 193 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544. Tel: 310-794-9380; Tel: 310-825-2642; Fax: 310-206-1784; e-mail: press@chicano.ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10